Ken K. Ito
--research on Japanese literature
Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan
Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
In my research on Japanese literature, primarily of the Meiji period (1868-1912), I explore how texts refract and pressure the social and cultural discourses surrounding them. Some of the discourses that interest me are those concerning status and class, the family, and gender, as these are articulated in the midst of sweeping historical change. I have become increasingly interested in the meaning-making functions of literature, both from the side of the text, which I principally explore through narratological analyses, and from the side of the reader, which I approach through reception studies. The texts I have worked on include the novels of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō; melodramatic fiction from the turn of the 20th century; and Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, on which I have published three studies.
Books
An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel
Stanford University Press, 2008
--recipient of the John W. Hall Prize of the Association of Asian Studies, given for an outstanding work on Japan in English.
Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds
Stanford University Press, 1991
Articles, Book Chapters, Proceedings
“Kokoro in the High School Textbook,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 29, 2017, pages 61-78.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/728582/pdf
“Kōkō kyōkasho no ‘Kokoro’,” in Sōseki no ibasho, Iwanami Shoten, 2019. Translation into Japanese of the article above.
https://www.iwanami.co.jp/book/b487921.html
“Melodrama, Family Romance, and the Novel at the Turn of the Century,” Cambridge History of Japanese Literature, ed. by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pages 605-612.
“Performing a Reading of Konjiki yasha,” Performance and Japanese Literature, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, 15, Summer 2014, pages 71-78.
“Class and Gender in a Meiji Family Romance: Kikuchi Yūhō’s Chikyōdai,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 28(2), Summer 2002, pages 339-378.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4126813?seq=1
"The Family and the Nation in Tokutomi Roka's Hototogisu," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 60(2), December 2000, pages 489-536.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2652633?seq=1
"Prefacing 'Sorrows of a Heretic'," in A Tanizaki Feast, ed. by Anthony Chambers (Ann Arbor: Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications, 1998), pages 21-32.
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/3t945s78r
(Open Access)
"'Itansha no kanashimi' no hashigaki," in Tanizaki Jun'ichirō kokusai symposium, ed. by Adriana Boscaro (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1997), pages 143-155. Translation into Japanese of the article above.
"Writing Time in Sōseki's Kokoro," in Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays in Honor of Edwin McClellan, ed. by Dennis Washburn and Alan Tansman (Ann Arbor: Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications, 1997), pages 3-21.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14WlaTb8C5_FDWK-SmCOV8HD8V1YK9mcd/view?usp=sharing
(pdf)
Translations
Nakashima Naoto, "Waiawa Station," Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 32, 2020, pages 229-253. A translation of "Waiawa eki" (1934).
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/5/article/875242
Tokutomi Roka, The Cuckoo, in A Tokyo Anthology:Literature from Japan’s Modern Metropolis, ed. by Sumie Jones and Charles Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017) pages 363-372. A translation of a chapter from the novel Hototogisu (1900).
Forthcoming
"How to Read—and Be Read by—Konjiki yasha: Reception, Performance, and
the Turn-of-the Century Japanese Novel"
--to be published in the Journal of Japanese Studies in 2023.
Videos
"Using Digital Japanese Texts in the Classroom"
--a pedagogically oriented video on how digital literary materials might be used in a fourth-year level Japanese course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReBoa6ZNMm4&t=29s
"Dismembered and Still Kicking: Kokoro in the High School Textbook"
--the John W. Hall Lecture delivered at the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, 3/29/2017